


when the wolves howl their song

by apollonian



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-16
Updated: 2014-03-16
Packaged: 2018-01-15 23:37:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1323481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollonian/pseuds/apollonian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boyd wakes up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when the wolves howl their song

Boyd wakes up.

He’s surprised he does – the last thing he remembers is Derek’s face, eyes big and wet, hair plastered to his forehead, hands shaking as he desperately tried to take away the last dregs of Boyd’s pain. He remembers closing his eyes, feeling the blood rush out of the holes in his chest, and hoping that he gets to meet Alicia and Erica and his grandmother again.

He remembers dying. 

He doesn’t wake up to bright white light like he had thought about when he was younger. The naked bulb glowing above him is dull and he’s lying on cold, solid cement. Three heartbeats surround him, one, slow and steady with sleep, the other two fast and nervous, and he recognizes all three immediately – Erica, Cora, and Derek.

He wonders what hell the alpha pack must have brought, if even Derek and Cora are dead now, come to join him and Erica. He doesn’t sit up, he isn’t ready to look at Erica’s ravaged body again, her head hanging lifeless and her hair matted and tangled, the way it never was when she was alive; he doesn’t want to see Derek and Cora’s mangled corpses either, he’s seen enough death – but wait. Corpses don’t _have_ heartbeats.

He sits up all at once, air whooshing into his lungs and not whistling out the holes Derek’s claws had left in his chest. Erica is lying next to him, unbroken, rosy-cheeked, definitely, truly alive, her face sweet in sleep. Derek sits cross-legged on his other side, face pale and drawn but hopeful, a look mirrored on Cora’s face next to him. He blinks once, slowly, pinches himself to make sure he’s not dreaming, and asks, “What the _hell_ is going on?”

Derek’s face relaxes into a small, tired smile, one he hasn’t seen since before he and Erica left. “You’re alive,” he says, heartbeat still pattering on nervously, “We – Cora and I – brought you two back.”

He should be surprised, Boyd thinks, but for some strange reason, he isn’t. In a world full of werewolves and kanimas and Peter Hale, what’s another resurrection story? He stands up, his muscles stiff and aching, and stretches for a long minute. Cora and Derek are still sitting down, looking up at him with identical expressions of awe. 

“Where’s the bathroom?” he asks, looking around and taking in the basement that it looks like they’re in, Derek’s penchant for abandoned places apparently not having subsided. Derek points him over to a rusting metal door, and Boyd walks over to it, pausing just before he goes in. “I have a lot of questions,” he says, “almost as many as Stiles used to have, and you’d better answer _all_ of them when I come back.” Derek nods, looking straight at him, and his heartbeat doesn’t waver.

*

The toilet is utilitarian, with plain stainless steel fixtures. The sound of the flush is loud in the small, enclosed space, loud enough to cover up the three heartbeats outside. Boyd washes his hands and his face with the cold water from the tap, looking at himself in the stained, cracked mirror. He looks the same as he always does, his face the stoic mask he perfected in his freshman year, with faint dark circles under his mother’s kind brown eyes.

He turns off the tap, wipes his hands on his pants – he’s wearing his black jeans, the pair he was wearing the day he died, and a different t-shirt, undamaged. His shoes are different, too, black sneakers with new socks itching against his toes. He looks in the mirror again, smiles at his reflection. His smile is – feels strange, something rarely dusted off and used in the past few days, weeks, months, ever since he met Derek and got caught up in the shitstorm that is his life.

At least he got something good out of that whole mess. Being a werewolf is actually quite – not nice, not good, not with the never-ending list of monsters hunting them – but something that got him noticed, got him people, got him friends to sit with at lunch, if only for a few weeks. He pulls up his wolf, blinks his golden eyes, bares his fangs, brings up his hand to look at his claws, curved and sharp.

It feels as though the alpha pack never happened, that he and Erica never ran away and fell into that stupid trap and got caught by the hunters and then the alphas. He swallows once, shifts back to human, and opens the door. Erica is still sleeping, but Derek’s arranging a blanket over her still form, and Cora’s laying out a water bottle and a few snacks – she has a backpack lying on the ground next to her.

He sits down, catches the bottle she throws him, nodding in thanks, and drinks while he waits for Derek to come sit down. 

Once he’s drunk his fill and eaten a small granola bar that he didn’t taste at all, he says, “Well, explain,” and waits as Derek visibly pulls his thoughts together.

Derek haltingly begins to tell him what happened after he died, Cora interjecting to explain the pieces she took part in. Derek explains giving his spark to Cora, turning into a beta, the various sacrifices. The ending – with the Darach, the alphas, Deucalion, and Peter – is particularly painful, and Derek’s face is twisted as if someone’s slowly pulling his teeth out.

He explains how Peter, after killing the Darach, simply disappeared, leaving only a vague note and no scent trail; how he and Cora debated for a while but finally left Beacon Hills; and how Scott finally took in Isaac into his pack. 

Cora takes over after that, explaining how Boyd and Erica’s bodies weren’t buried properly, because there had been no time, no time at all, and their parents were still convinced that they had run away together. She ignores Boyd’s wince and the skip in his heartbeat at the mention of his family, and continues on.

She’d convinced Derek to go to South America, down to Argentina, to the pack that had taken her in when she’d escaped the burning Hale house. They’d met with the emissary of the pack, who’d offered them a chance to rebuild their pack, the Hale pack, if they were willing to go on a week-long, treacherous trip to get some rare herb for her. With nothing to lose, they’d gone on the trip, walking and camping and getting to know each other better, and once they’d come back triumphant, the emissary had pushed two pearls into Cora’s hand and told her what they had to do to bring back Boyd and Erica.

Cora pauses then, looks steadily at Boyd. “Do you really want to know what we did to bring you back?” she asks. Derek looks down, closes his eyes, as if reliving the memory in his head.

Boyd feels the curiosity pulling at him, but he thinks for a minute and then shakes his head. He’d rather not understand the nitty-gritty details of what the Hale siblings did to perform a resurrection, as long as it wasn’t anything similar to Peter’s, and he explains as much.

Derek looks up sharply at the mention of Peter, and vehemently shakes his head, saying, “No, no, _nothing_ like Peter, that was – he was an anomaly, an abomination—”

Boyd nods, and nods again, and Cora continues on. They brought Erica and Boyd’s bodies out-of-state without ringing any alarm bells, holed up in an old building next to where one of their aunts used to live in Portland, performed the ritual, and now here they were. 

“The ritual,” Derek begins, and stops. He swallows, begins again. “The ritual, well, it was to bring back pack members – but I’ll, I’ll completely understand if you don’t want to be in my – our pack anymore, Scott’s still in Beacon Hills, and Isaac’s there too, and your families…” He trails off. 

Boyd’s struck by a sudden pang of homesickness, for his sister and his brother and his mother, for the cramped house and the crappy Toyota his mom drove and even for the ice rink, for the Zamboni and the smell of clean ice. 

He closes his eyes for a second, takes a deep breath. “It’s summer vacation for school now, if I’m calculating right,” he says, “Do I have to decide now?” 

Derek waits until they make eye contact, and says, “No, you have as much time as you need. Cora and I were planning to travel around Argentina and South America, and you and Erica are welcome to join. Once you’ve made your choice, we’ll do whatever you want.” His heart rate hasn’t slowed down a whit since Boyd woke up, and Boyd can see the tension in his shoulders. 

“I’ll come, travel along,” Boyd says, thankful that his family doesn’t know he is – was – dead. “But I need to talk to Erica, first, once she wakes up.”

Derek takes a deep breath, and some of the tension leaches out as his heartbeat slows down just a fraction. “Alright, that’s, that’s good,” he says, as he gets up to his feet and holds out a hand for Cora. Once they’re both up, Derek tosses him a cheap phone and asks him if he wants anything while he and Cora make a grocery run. Boyd refuses, but promises to call if Erica wakes up while they’re gone, and lifts a hand in farewell. 

Once their heartbeats fade into the distance, he turns and faces Erica, and takes hold of one of her hands, her pulse beating unbelievably strong and steady in her wrist.

_Wake up,_ he thinks at her, _wake up and look at this new life we’ve got._ Erica stirs minutely, almost as if she heard him, and Boyd closes his eyes and hopes.

**Author's Note:**

> Partially inspired by that post going around on Tumblr about how Boyd, Erica, and Cora are living happily in South America somewhere :-)


End file.
